Well another month is upon us. This last month was particularly busy
since I was able to afford the USENIX technical conference, in New
Orleans --- the best annual gathering of fellow Unix and Linux nerds
I've ever found. If you can get your boss to send you to just one
computing technical conference in the next year --- ask for it to be
this one (or the USENIX/LISA --- Large Installation Systems
Administration which will be in December).

Linus was there with his wife, Tove, and their two baby daughters.
He agreed to host an "intimate little BoF" (Birds of a Feather
discussion) which turned out to have over half of the conference
attending it (much to his surprise).

The '97 USENIX in Anaheim had a "parallel track" for Linux. This
year had one for "Freenix" (collectively referring to FreeBSD,
NetBSD, OpenBSD, and the GNU HURD, in addition to Linux). It's
important for us (Linux users) to recognize that Linux wasn't the
first "free" Unix kernel, and it is by no means the only one.

I've been trying to encourage the free *BSD users (all variants) to
come out of the woodwork and show up at their local Linux user's
group meetings. I know they'll be welcome at the Silicon Valley
LUG (http://www.svlug.org) and
I sincerely hope that they'll be welcome at other Linux events.
Now that we're getting enough market
share to get noticed in the press, and to have some effect on the
decisions of hardware and software vendors (particularly in the areas
that relate to documentation and NDA's) --- it would be a very bad
time for us to get embroiled in the sorts of infighting that's been
stifling the commercial Unix vendors for so long.

I noticed an interesting press release (forwarded to me by my wife)
regarding Microsoft's new "WISE" (Windows Interface Source Environment:
http://www.microsoft.com/win32dev/base/wise.htm) which basically
looks like a scheme to bolster the commercial Unix vendors up in their
battle against the free Unix clones (by providing them with some
limited support for running Windows '95 software). (From the looks
of it the WINE and Bochs projects may eventually be more capable).

Luckily these, and the other interesting user space projects that
are going to make Linux more accessible to non-technical users,
like GNOME, KDE, and GNUStep are portable. Linux has been a
primary development platform for many of these projects --- but
they all run under other versions of Unix.

So, while it may look like Linux is "taking over the world" ---
it is also opening up a world of opportunity for all of the other
Unix variants. There are now a few million users of Linux that will
feel right at home in just about any Unix on just about any hardware.